Edna Ashenden was born in New Plymouth in 1922 and died in 2019.

Edna moved to Wellington from Taranaki when she was fourteen, and her first Mt Victoria memories are of Wellington East Girls College.
“Going to Wellington East was the biggest shock of my life. I couldn’t believe the amenities . . . The typing room was two typewriters outside the headmistress’s office.”
During the war, Edna met Arthur Ashenden at one of the dances she loved going to. “I was with two friends; we always went around . . . and the three of us met up with three airmen. And this airman said he’d like to take me home.”
Edna and Arthur were married in 1943. “When he was demobbed, we all stayed with my parents, and by this time there were two children – we had a bit of a houseful. But houses were very difficult to either rent or buy, and we were looking to rent.”
Not long after, they came to live in the home Arthur’s family had rented for many years in Austin Street. Arthur’s father and youngest brother were still living there. “All the rest of the family were married and had their own homes, so we came in to look after the two males.” Asked what looking after the two males meant, Edna responded, “A lot of hard work, I suppose. A lot of tight lips.”
eventually bought the house themselves. The question of purchase was raised with State Advances “And they said they’d lend all the money, but they were going to hold 200 pounds back because we had to have the borer cured, we had to have a new roof, we had to have it painted. The only thing we did was paint it because Arthur argued with them, being a plumber, he could repair it and it didn’t need a new roof. And the borer cure – we sort of ignored that and the borer-cure people ignored us. So it’s still never been borer cured. Borer comes out every year to see us and that’s it.”
When their daughters went to Clyde Quay School, she and Arthur became involved in the Home and School Committee. “From the Home and School, the Mt Victoria Progressive Association was formed because, while the girls were at school, it was noted that the Victoria Bowling Club had sold their lot and were having access to the green belt, to build there . . . It started in that little corner over there, with three of us.”
Why the indignation of the Bowling Club occupation? “Because it was the playing field for Clyde Quay. And it was the playing field, too, for a lot of crews of ships that would come in. They used to go up there – especially English; they had their soccer balls, you know.”
A memory that sticks in her mind is one of the murders discovered on Mt Victoria. “She was the lady that was found battered in one of the gun emplacements on Mt Victoria. And for that whole week before they (I won’t say ‘caught’ because they already had him in custody), but before they charged the murderer, it was so windy; and you’d look up on that hill and everything was just going backwards and forwards with the wind. And you sort of felt, ‘Oh, that’s the movement of the murderer’, you know.”
Edna has seen many changes over 61 years in Austin Street. In the days of trams, they could be heard from her home, going down Pirie Street. “When the tram got to the corner he had to ‘clang-clang’ to tell the people driving into it – ‘cause that corner was notorious for accidents . . . two doors down, a family that lived there said they’d got a permanent supply of bandages and all that sort of thing, because they were always rushing out to either two cars, or the car and the tram, or something like that.”
“It’s very nice now to see the young children back, ‘cause we went through a phase there of mostly elderly or flats . . . I suppose that would be eighties and nineties that the children came back into the neighbourhood.”
Some changes are not so good, however. “The church I was married in – that’s disappeared. That’s now a Kentucky Fry.” One of the reasons Edna says she and Arthur married in the Presbyterian church was “I didn’t want to have to kneel at the altar and I didn’t want to ladder my stockings, because it was wartime. (And also the fact that Arthur’s family lived in the neighbourhood, and it was convenient.)” She was pretty universal in her religion by this point but “I didn’t like the fact that a church would have a Kentucky Fry on it.”

Caption: Edna with her two young daughters at 82 Austin Street

Caption: Edna and Arthur talk about their memories to the Evening Post in 1985